Why is being fat/obese socially acceptable?

ScumLord

Wibbs wrote: »

I agree, but where is it all coming from? Where were the underactive thyroids/PCOS/type 2 diabetes etc* 30 years ago?

In countries with money probably. Overall there just wasn't the food there to get an entire population fat. Now we have the money, food is cheaper and has more calories.

I really believe our food is too cheap, we need to put value back in it and stop listening to these families that say they can't afford to feed their children unless they buy cheap crap in bulk to feed their obviously overweight children. Stop listening to children overall, our society has been overtaken by the wants of children.

seraphimvc

ScumLord wrote: »

In countries with money probably. Overall there just wasn't the food there to get an entire population fat. Now we have the money, food is cheaper and has more calories.

I really believe our food is too cheap, we need to put value back in it and stop listening to these families that say they can't afford to feed their children unless they buy cheap crap in bulk to feed their obviously overweight children. Stop listening to children overall, our society has been overtaken by the wants of children.

:eek: if thats the reason then we will have the least obese population in europe i'd say. no stats needed.

Penny Dreadful

Wibbs wrote: »

I agree, but where is it all coming from? Where were the underactive thyroids/PCOS/type 2 diabetes etc* 30 years ago? I look back at my school photos and the "fat lad" in my year wasnt close to fat by todays definitions. In the same annual looking at the class photos across the school ages and there were very very few overweight kids. Looking at a mates girl school pics from 25 years ago and the same thing. She noted this as she was shocked by her mates daughters school annual and she thought her memory was playing tricks. But no, a definite difference in average weight. And this is schoolkids. The healthy average looking kids by todays defintion were often bigger than the average in the past and there were kids the size of which you just didnt see in the past.

Something has changed. Diet is a big one. Fast food, any fast food was considered a rare treat, not a weekly thing as part of the diet. Most food was not in boxes or packets and was home cooked. Meat and two veg kinda thing. The nature of the food was different. Pastas and pizzas would be very rare to see. Then exercise. I knew only two or three kids who got lifts to school as they lived a great distance away. The rest bused or walked or cycled. This was a fee paying rugger bugger place too. Now the cars line up outside to drop the kids to school. Play time has changed. More sedentary things like Wii's and the like. Its almost entirely environmental and lifestyle. This lifestyle may well and does increase thyroid issues, PCOS, diabetes(2) to the point where it takes over, but the childhood diet and environment causes it in the first place. These diseases and their consequences are almost unknown in cultures on a better, non western diet. As is obesity.



*and indeed asthma. I knew two kids in my entire year of 100 plus that had asthma. One other with bad hay fever. God love him, he stood out as his face used to get puffy from it and as kids can be bastards we used to call him "chink" as his eyes would squint. Now every second kid has some allergy or other, with spare inhalers and even O2 in some school's nursing stations.

Isn't it funny how fast food, which is without doubt poor quality food, is seen as treat?

ScumLord

seraphimvc wrote: »

:eek: if thats the reason then we will have the least obese population in europe i'd say. no stats needed.

Food is too cheap all over the world, I think the likes of Tescos should be banned, that company is responsible for the destruction of so many things. I'm not saying they're an evil entity they're just a very good business doing what businesses do, which always works out bad for everyone bar the top management of that particular business.

Penny Dreadful

ScumLord wrote: »

In countries with money probably. Overall there just wasn't the food there to get an entire population fat. Now we have the money, food is cheaper and has more calories.

I really believe our food is too cheap, we need to put value back in it and stop listening to these families that say they can't afford to feed their children unless they buy cheap crap in bulk to feed their obviously overweight children. Stop listening to children overall, our society has been overtaken by the wants of children.

Bad food is too cheap and good healthy food is far too expensive.

Pace2008

CreepingDeath wrote: »

Who wants to go out to exercise in miserable Irish weather 9 months of the year. And how many people now have an increased commute to work and less free time ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obdd31Q9PqA

SV

Penny Dreadful wrote: »

Bad food is too cheap and good healthy food is far too expensive.

That's a myth tbh, since I started eating healthy i'm saving a crap load of money

I bought 25 chicken breast fillets for 15euro the other day and a load of rice for another tenner.. There's 10 large dinners in that with fillets left over.. How many takeaways would ya get for 25 euro?

seraphimvc

ScumLord wrote: »

Food is too cheap all over the world

ah comon now in that case the whole world should just raise the price of food:pac: i sure believe the obese people are increasing globally tho. (my point of my last post is the prices of the food in this country(esp. dublin) is not cheap at all.)

ScumLord wrote: »

I think the likes of Tescos should be banned

hehe

scumloard you are not some politician in training are you?:D

Dudess

Yeah I get a big salad and a bowl of soup for lunch every day and it saves me a fortune, whereas I know I'd have less money left if I went to Spar etc and got a big baguette.

seraphimvc

SV wrote: »

That's a myth tbh, since I started eating healthy i'm saving a crap load of money

I bought 25 chicken breast fillets for 15euro the other day and a load of rice for another tenner.. There's 10 large dinners in that with fillets left over.. How many takeaways would ya get for 25 euro?

please tell us where you buy that and that shop will be rich from tomorrow on!

ScumLord

SV wrote: »

That's a myth tbh, since I started eating healthy i'm saving a crap load of money

I bought 25 chicken breast fillets for 15euro the other day and a load of rice for another tenner.. There's 10 large dinners in that with fillets left over.. How many takeaways would ya get for 25 euro?

I have a friend who's always on about how cheaply he can feed himself, the missus and their five kids.

He reckons everything works out cheaper if you buy the right ingredients. He reckons he can feed the family for a fiver and that's buying the good stuff. He is big into his cooking though and is willing to drive to the Galway docks to buy the fresh fish and has started growing his own veg since he lost his job.

I wouldn't buy cheap chicken though, won't contribute to battery farms.

Penny Dreadful

SV wrote: »

That's a myth tbh, since I started eating healthy i'm saving a crap load of money

I bought 25 chicken breast fillets for 15euro the other day and a load of rice for another tenner.. There's 10 large dinners in that with fillets left over.. How many takeaways would ya get for 25 euro?

I agree with you totally about that. Takeaway food is (I think) very expensive for the rubbish that it is. However there are many people who think giving €25 to a Domino's delivery guy is a great way to feed a family and you don't have to make the effort to cook. For them that €25.00 dinner is cheap and cheerful. To me and you it is several chicken fillets, peppers, onions, chilli peppers, tomatos, rice, coconut milk, garlic, .........basically you can get lots of healthy, tasty, delicious dinners from this. It also involves cooking, which I like, oddly enough I find chopping vegetables relaxing and I love making something different and new.
Also if you are organised you can make double the amount of dinner and freeze portion. This is great if you're having a busy week. I do this a lot and it means that before I leave for work I take my dinner out to defrost and all I have to do when I get in is cook off my rice.
The cheap bad food I was talking about is in the frozen section of the supermarket where you get three for two pizzas, chicken nuggets and pre packed microwave dinners. Again this type of food requires little or no preparation and feeds into the psyche of people who feel they don't have enough time to cook. This is the type of food that I think should be marked up in price while fresh fruit and vegetables and good quality meat, poultry and fish should be marked down.

topper75

lizt wrote: »

A lot of people have been saying that obese people have no respect for themselves because of the crap they put into their body. It's not just obese people. I was standing in a queue in Spar the other day and there was two girls in front of me. One of them was buying a sausage roll, chocolate bar and a bottle of coke for her breakfast. The other had a jambon, a chocolate bar and a bottle of sprite. Neither of these girls were over a size ten.
They then proceeded to talk about these guys that they knew that were fitness mad. They ended the conversation with "Jesus, thank god I don't have to work out or go to the gym - can you imagine?"

Explain that.

They were girls. One day they will become women. Fat women.

Pace2008

lizt wrote: »

. I was standing in a queue in Spar the other day and there was two girls in front of me. One of them was buying a sausage roll, chocolate bar and a bottle of coke for her breakfast. The other had a jambon, a chocolate bar and a bottle of sprite. Neither of these girls were over a size ten.
They then proceeded to talk about these guys that they knew that were fitness mad. They ended the conversation with "Jesus, thank god I don't have to work out or go to the gym - can you imagine?"

Explain that.

You play with the cards you're dealt.

Big Nasty

SV wrote: »

since I started eating healthy i'm saving a crap load of money

I bought 25 chicken breast fillets for 15euro the other day and a load of rice for another tenner

You call that eating healthy! :eek::eek::eek:

Pace2008

MCMLXXV wrote: »

You call that eating healthy! :eek::eek::eek:

Brown rice and lean chicken are very healthy. Bodybuilding food.

topper75

Dudess wrote: »

Has anyone referred to appeals to be a bit more understanding of overweight people as do-gooder/PC bullsh1t yet?

Well, is it OK to hate the fat, rather than the god/goddess trapped underneath it?

Wibbs

Penny Dreadful wrote: »

Isn't it funny how fast food, which is without doubt poor quality food, is seen as treat?

Oh yea ice cream is bad for you in large doses but is also a "treat" the problem is when it becomes a staple.

topper75 wrote: »

They were girls. One day they will become women. Fat women.

Same for men like that. So called middle aged spread hit my male mates in their late 20's. Now its more like mid 20's. Same ith a lot of women. Slim, but soft at 18, chubby by 23, heavy by 34. They were never healthy slim as it were. If they are of the type that puts on weight after childbirth its a different thing and apparently does have a genetic basis. A woman that piles it on taking the pill will likely be the same after childbirth unless she works real hard not to. Unlikely as raising a child is rightfully the priority.

Pace2008 wrote: »

Brown rice and lean chicken are very healthy. Bodybuilding food.

Funny, one study I read showed a correlation between chicken intake and cancer rates that were higher. AFAIR it was native americans who dont eat chicken as part of their culture had much lower rates than similar native americans living in big cities that did. I must dig it up. It makes sense. Why would any culture who kept chickens eat them that often? An utter waste as they provide eggs on a daily basis, so better to not eat them.

Personally I avoid chicken. The chicken we get especially the cheap crap is very cruelly raised. The "good" ones are corn fed, as if corn was a good thing. Its not. Its cheap. chickens arent meant to eat a cereal diet, but the corn industry would have you believe otherwise. Chicken in the "wild" eat all sorts of stuff, insects and foliage. True free range clucking around the farmyard chicken eggs taste sooooo much better and have many more nutrients.

ScumLord

Wibbs wrote: »

True free range clucking around the farmyard chicken eggs taste sooooo much better and have many more nutrients.

Plus their assholes which makes it so much easier to eat them.

SV

MCMLXXV wrote: »

You call that eating healthy! :eek::eek::eek:

a hell of a lot healthier than a quarter pounder and chips!

Penny Dreadful

Wibbs wrote: »

Oh yea ice cream is bad for you in large doses but is also a "treat" the problem is when it becomes a staple.
.

True, there is also the learned behaviour of food to consider too. Teaching your kids that a takeaway is a treat for good behaviour or doing well at school isn't a good idea. Similarly giving your child a biscuit for comfort when they fall down and cut their knee is teaching them that food is there as a comfort in all bad circumstances is giving them a bad pattern to follow for life.

Wibbs

Whatever about the chips a quarter pounder would have a higher nutrient load per calorific load than a breast of farmed chicken. Majorly so if you sourced the ingredients yourself. Brown rice while being better than white rice is mostly starch.


EDIT for bodybuilding types looking for protein though, chicken breast would be idea in fairness.

Wibbs

Penny Dreadful wrote: »

Teaching your kids that a takeaway is a treat for good behaviour or doing well at school isn't a good idea. Similarly giving your child a biscuit for comfort when they fall down and cut their knee is teaching them that food is there as a comfort in all bad circumstances is giving them a bad pattern to follow for life.

:eek::eek: do people do that? Jesus. Thats mad.

SV

Wibbs wrote: »

EDIT for bodybuilding types looking for protein though, chicken breast would be idea in fairness.

well that's what I'm looking at really..

Penny Dreadful

Wibbs wrote: »

:eek::eek: do people do that? Jesus. Thats mad.

Yep sadly they do. I hear some of the parents in my office talk about the food they give their children for dinner and how they take them out for a McDonalds because they did so well in school last week or were a bit down for some reason or other........... More than a few of them have children that are fat, there is no other word for it, they are fat and yet they still carry on with this "food is a reward for x,y,z" idea.

Its funny to me really. I'm 32, hardly out of the ark, and yet don't remember food being such an issue in my life as a child. We got up on a school morning and a full healthy (then considered just breakfast) breakfast was eaten before school.Walked to schoo. Lunch at school which was eaten before running around like lunatics (again no letters home from the school about what can and can't appear in a child's lunch box) consisted of an apple, orange, yoghurt, home made brown bread, and I loved (weird as it may sound) having raw carrots and white cabbage and orange juice. Walked home from school, may or may not have had a snack (of fruit generally) before dinner and dinner was always homemade. TV was very limited but we didn't even look for it that often as we were outside playing which was just the norm then.
I had my 8 year old niece at the NAC a few weeks ago and it was really really sad to look around and see that she stood out by being (what seems to me) a normal skinny little kid compared to all of the other over weight and obese kids.
Re: the genetic obesity, I work in medical research and have yet to come across the "fat gene". Have many for blue eyes, BRACA 1 and 2 cancers, Huntingtons Disease, etc but none for being fat.

prinz

Penny Dreadful wrote: »

We got up on a school morning and a full healthy (then considered just breakfast) breakfast was eaten before school.Walked to schoo. Lunch at school which was eaten before running around like lunatics (again no letters home from the school about what can and can't appear in a child's lunch box) consisted of an apple, orange, yoghurt, home made brown bread, and I loved (weird as it may sound) having raw carrots and white cabbage and orange juice. Walked home from school, may or may not have had a snack (of fruit generally) before dinner and dinner was always homemade. TV was very limited but we didn't even look for it that often as we were outside playing which was just the norm then.

Snap. Sounds exactly like my own past, from the home made brown bread to the raw veg. Those were the good times. I remember being the odd one out at school though.

Penny Dreadful

prinz wrote: »

Snap. Sounds exactly like my own past, from the home made brown bread to the raw veg. Those were the good times. I remember being the odd one out at school though.

Me too but I think that was more down to the raw veg rather than having a healthy/ normal lunch. Now that I look back I realise how lucky I was really. My dad grew almost everything that we ate, potatos, tomatos, carrots, broccoli, turnips, cabbage, lettuce, apples, plums, scallions, peas, onions, beetroot, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries were all grown at home. My uncle had a dairy farm and so we got milk fresh from there every morning and when he slaughtered cows and sheep and lambs he gave my mum (each of his sisters really) a lot of meat.
We knew the source of everything we ate and knew that the animals were fed well and cared for and the food my dad grew wasn't sprayed with chemicals and was as fresh as could be. My mum was a stay at home mum for whom the norm was cooking dinners not going to the chipper.

drkpower

Penny Dreadful wrote: »

True, there is also the learned behaviour of food to consider too. Teaching your kids that a takeaway is a treat for good behaviour or doing well at school isn't a good idea. Similarly giving your child a biscuit for comfort when they fall down and cut their knee is teaching them that food is there as a comfort in all bad circumstances is giving them a bad pattern to follow for life.

What a load of nonsense!

Fair enough, everytime your kid does their homework, I wouldnt be bringing them to McDonalds, but there is nothing wrong with treating kids to something that they like when they have done something significant.
Should kids not be rewarded with half hour watching TV when they have done all their homework?
Or an icecream cone on a sunny day when they have cut the grass for you?
Or Mcdonalds when they get 80% in their Christmas test?

There is absilutely nothing wrong with doing any of these things on an occasional basis and linking such occasional 'treats' to the hard work that goes into achieving something significant is a good thing.

Adults do precisely the same thing themselves (champagne after getting an exam/as a celebration; big deal in work completed - reward yourself with a rich calorie-laden slap-up meal in a fancy restaurant). Rewarding oneself/one's kids with something a little bid 'bad' for hard work completed is a positive. And suggesting that it is a sign of bad parenting is a nonsense.

prinz

drkpower wrote: »

What a load of nonsense!
Fair enough, everytime your kid does their homework, I wouldnt be bringing them to McDonalds, but there is nothing wrong with treating kids to something that they like when they have done something significant.
Should kids not be rewarded with half hour watching TV when they have done all their homework?

Kids doing their homework shouldn't be seen as some sort of significant achievement tbh.:rolleyes:

You are both correct. There is nothing wrong in treating your kids occasionally but treating them as some sort of a reward system/pick me up is just conditioning behaviour, no different to giving a puppy a treat. This is something which winds me up no end whenever I see that bint Jo Frost/Supernanny being described as some sort of parenting expert. The only thing she is an expert in is conditioning which is irrelevant in the longer term.

The amount of obese people who lay the blame of their obesity on 'emotional eating' reinforces Penny's point. Had a hard day at work - have a take away, feeling down eat a tub of ice cream, upset because you're obese - eat some more...

Penny Dreadful

drkpower wrote: »

What a load of nonsense!

Fair enough, everytime your kid does their homework, I wouldnt be bringing them to McDonalds, but there is nothing wrong with treating kids to something that they like when they have done something significant.
Should kids not be rewarded with half hour watching TV when they have done all their homework?
Or an icecream cone on a sunny day when they have cut the grass for you?
Or Mcdonalds when they get 80% in their Christmas test?

There is absilutely nothing wrong with doing any of these things on an occasional basis and linking such occasional 'treats' to the hard work that goes into achieving something significant is a good thing.

Adults do precisely the same thing themselves (champagne after getting an exam/as a celebration; big deal in work completed - reward yourself with a rich calorie-laden slap-up meal in a fancy restaurant). Rewarding oneself/one's kids with something a little bid 'bad' for hard work completed is a positive. And suggesting that it is a sign of bad parenting is a nonsense.

Occasional is fine but given the profits McDonalds et al show on a regular basis there is nothing occasional about it on the larger scale. I didn't say parents who do this are bad parents, I just think that teaching kids that McDonalds is a reward isn't a good idea and because you learn this in childhood you carry it over into your adult life. You can reward by going to the zoo, going to the cinema, horse riding for example........all things that aren't the norm and are therefore a treat for the child.